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We want to challenge online gender-based violence and to engage technology with pleasure, creativity and curiosity. To do this, we all need to build our capacity in digital safety. Join us in two fun learning activities drawn from the beta-version of FTX: Safety Reboot.

Feminist Tech eXchanges

FTX is WRP’s unique approach to building capacity, which creates safe spaces of exchange and experience where the politics and practice of technology are informed by local, concrete and contextual realities of women. These spaces aim to build collective knowledge and ownership with core values that emphasise the role of women in technology, prioritise appropriate and sustainable technologies, and are participatory and inclusive, secure, fun, grounded in women’s realities, transparent and open, creative and strategic. Our political framing and tool for analysis are the Feminist Principles of the Internet. We emphasise local ownership of FTX and have seen the uptake of FTX by our members and partners over the years.

FTX: Safety Reboot

We are collaboratively developing the FTX: Safety Reboot as a practical resource for trainers working with women’s rights and sexual rights activists on digital safety. It is a feminist contribution to the global response to digital security capacity building, adding to existing training guides but rooted in a feminist approach to technology. The curriculum aims to enable trainers to build awareness within communities of how to respond to online gender-based violence and build confidence and skills to be safe and effective in online spaces. It responds to the obstacles and challenges faced by activists where misogyny, censorship and surveillance are restricting our freedom of expression and ability to share information, create alternative economies, build communities of solidarity and express desires. The FTX: Safety Reboot explores how we occupy online spaces, how women are represented, how we can counter discourses and how norms contribute to discrimination and violence.

FTX: Safety Reboot will be released in 2017, but today you get to sample two learning activities. Write a short blog, snap a pic, draw or record an audio clip of responses to these prompting questions and send to us at ideas@takebackthetech.net to post on our site or tweet with #takebackthetech. Consider doing these activities in a group in order to explore commonalities and differences and what may cause them.

Learning activity 1: The wall of people's firsts

This action is to help you interrogate your experiences of how technology and the internet are gendered. You will explore your experience of technology as a woman, a sexual rights activist, a woman human rights defender, a differently abled person, etc. and bring obstacles, pleasures and frustrations to the surface.

What was your first experience of technology?

What tool/s did you use?

Think about your first experience in terms of the ways you identify yourself or are identified by others. If you are a sexual rights activist, talk about first time you searched a sex term online. What did you find? How did you feel? Did you “see” yourself? If you are a WHRD, write up the first time you organised online. What did you do? Were there repercussions? Was it empowering for those involved? What would you do differently now?

Learning activity 2: Develop your internet dream place

As activists, we often feel unsafe offline and online. In this activity, which you can do alone or with your friends, develop your internet dream place! Draw or write based on these prompts:

What is it called? What does it look like?

Who is it for? Who is it not for? How can you make sure? How do people find each other?

What are the rules? What if the rules are not followed?

What topics can people discuss? What can they not?

Where is it hosted? Can it even exist according to your national laws?

Who might threaten the safety of this space? Internally and externally? How can you protect it?